Rare Beauty, a cult, mission-driven beauty brand founded by Selena Gomez, tapped Shop to reveal their first-ever fine fragrance: Rare Eau de Parfum. By creating scratch-and-sniff billboards, placed at street-level around New York City, the partnership encouraged fans to fall in love with the new fragrance on the spot—and be the first to order an exclusive, pre-launch sample on Shop.
The ‘smell and tell’ strategy
Why tell fans about the new fragrance when they can smell it for themselves? This was Rare Beauty and Shop’s simple yet effective strategy to spark widespread buzz around a product as personal and sensory as a fragrance. They knew a physical, sniffable activation was the best way to engage fans on a large scale, inspire them to order their exclusive sample, and leave a sweet, lasting impression. And that’s exactly what happened.
Sampling is key to purchase, and we were able to seamlessly drive trial before the fragrance hit shelves, all while maintaining the immersive experience we were providing exclusively to the NYC community.
Creating a memorable, sensorial experience
By scratching the street-level billboards around New York City, fans could get a whiff of the new fragrance, allowing them to truly immerse themselves in the scent and share an intimate (yet instagrammable) moment with Rare Beauty. Fans were prompted to scan a QR code that granted them exclusive access to a sample through Shop’s innovative geo-gated technology—before it went live on RareBeauty.com.
IRL, the activation built big brand love. Online, it drove major hype across social, which had fans waiting in anticipation for the official launch.
We wanted to create a moment as memorable as the scent itself.
It was love at first sniff
Together, Rare Beauty and Shop—where beauty shopping continues to be one of the most popular categories on the platform—discovered an unexpected way to connect with their community through their senses, creating a seamless physical-to-digital collaboration. The activation reimagined the solo act of fragrance sampling into a moment worth sharing, right on the streets of NYC. All it took was a compelling concept, and a powerful partnership to bring it to life.
We're always looking for new ways to connect with our community. Through the simple actions of smelling, scratching, and scanning, Shop helped us rewrite the rules of trial and transaction.